ARTS_ The Michigan Daily Wednesday, October 15, 1980 Page I THE UNDEFINED MISS M I Bette' s usual 'Divine Madness' Play opens at Loft The Extra Crunchy Theatre is presenting Italian playwright Daio Fo's play We Can't Pay, We Won't Pay this Thursday through Sunday, October 16-19. Performances will be at the Canterbury Loft, upstairs at 332 S. State, nightly at 8:00 p.m., with a Sunday 2:00 matinee. The play is a seriocomic protest dealing with "consumers who just won't take it anymore." Tickets are on sale at the door only, on a first-come, first-serve basis; a $3 admission donation is requested, but, as always at the Loft, any contribution is left to be decided by the visitor. By DENNIS HARVEY Bette Midler may yet turn out to be the screen queen of the '80's, and one keeps waiting anxiously for some proof of it. Divine Madness isn't that sort of occasion-it's more like a stalling tac- tic. After a startling performance as The Rose last year, Midler almost seems to be regressing by following it up with this filmed document of her stage show. Divine Madness is an extraordinarily well-made concert film-craft has never before been the keynote of a Michael Ritchie (Smile, Semi-Tough, The Candidate) movie, but it's daz- zlingly forefront here-and it has almost enough of the inspired camp knowingness that makes Bette Midler one of the most entertaining stage presences in the world. BUT ALL OF its pleasures seem, finally, fleeting-ripe and amply equipped for taking new risks on the screen, Midler seems to be burning out the ultimate-drag-queen appeal she's been riding on for nearly ten years. Divine Madness is, however, a model of how concert films should be filmed and inexplicably never are. It's even more visually alive than The Last Waltz, the only other recent major ex- ception to the general rule of head-on non-technique. After the dismaying amateur disaster of No Nukes, with its grainy procession of rigidly viewed facial sections, Ritchie's lithe, gliding camera work is a relief.. At last, someone who knows where to look at a 0 performer and how to develop a num- ber's visual drama, rather than the usual any-view-that-can-be-grabbed approach. The deft editing and movement during a ghostly prelude to "Leader of the Pack" (with The Harlet- tes, Bette's amusingly used-looking backups, bizarrely done up as Bowiesque androgenous punks) has a spectral grace that totally transcends the theatre-on-film genre-it gives you a visual charge that even a. front-row- center seat for the actual event couldn't have rivalled. THE MAJOR disappointment of Divine Madness is its material. It's Bet- te's earlier, more sharply funny and tightly conceived shows watered down and condensed, with a greatest-hits lineup indifferently subplanted by (no longer integrated with) anything-for-a- yock vulgarity. The latter goods have lost most of the pungency they had at * the time of the star's Home Box Office c6ncert spedial four years ago (clunkily filmed, but in every other way a superior performance-the real "Time capsule" Midler record). They now ride mostly on good will. One jokey in- terlude involving Hitler's farting is so mirthlessly "dirty" that it belongs in the repertoire of a lounge-circuit stand- up comic. The "South Seas Adventure" segment, featuring "Delores DeLago, the Toast of Chicago," satirizes just that sort of middle-American tawdriness, but it's an unfocused and fragmented pasting-together of new material and bits from a near-brilliant old routine-The Vickie Edie Show, "Around the world in 80 Ways." self-indulgence and hammy (if hear-. tfelt) excesses. The tightrope is effec- tively walked throughout The Rose and in a few of her recorded ballads (especially John Prine's uncliched tearjerker "Hello in There"), but she can too easily become slightly in em- barrassing in her display, like the lat- ter-day Judy Garland or a real sap like Vickie Carr. She exists on some uneasy perch between Las Vegas and the rock hourglass figure waddles around in outrageous beyond-Joey Heatherton outfits, as campy as Carmen Miranda. HER VERSION of "You Can't Always Get What You Want" 0) is, at least, over before you quite have a chance to scream in pain-her glitzy treatments of real rock songs have always been a fright. All the expected 1950's/60's top-ten standards ("Chapel of Love") and big-band hits ("In the Mood") are acceptably revved-up. An excess of broad comic gestures does in Tom Waits' touching "Shiver Me Tim- bers," but "The Rose" is a small revelation. A wrong final note of pop triteness at the end of the movie, over- played on the radio-not really much of a song, no matter what the Acadmey says-it's awfully charming here, and Midler has the wit to be flippant about it. Midler's debut in The Rose was possibly the most startling and assured in movie history-one wild, schizoid solo flight up and down the emotional ladder, from self-protective vulgarity to crushed pathos, always on the edge of destruction. If such a Star Is Falling role would have drained the resources of most actors and actresses, it was perfectly tailored to Midler's, to the anxiousness to please that has always lent her professionalism an undertow of appealling vulnerability. As with Streisand's debut in Funny Girl, shticks into something more pliable, or at least different, and by this time her patented quirks and brassy manufactured charm (which is getting to be as stony as Joan Crawford's) are about as pain- fully familiar as Lucille Ball's double- takes-and unlike Ball, Streisand has not yet been saved by officially passing into a state of Nostalgia. Bette Midler is a warmer, funkier, less strident per- former, and even if Divine Madness is far from the definite Divine Miss M concert film it claims to be, it's a good deal more essentially trashy and bearable than a similar Streisand ven- ture could be-there's no hostessy graciousness, and the big heartbreak numbers lack great-lady condescen- sion. Still at the flash-of-unlimited- potential stage, Midler is-as yet-far clear of being stuck in a self-coddling rut like Streisand. Divine Madness per- forms the unnecessary, if enjoyable, service of introducing to her new mass audience the camp variety-show- mistress her (predominently gay) following has loved for years. The iner- tia that creeps into some of this per- formance indicates she's ready to shed that particular guise and take up some more challenging ones. Hopefully, Divine Madness will be a last delay before the plunge. MANN THEATRES ( I DAILY DISCOUNT MATINEES flLL GE TAll seats $2.00 til 5:30 375MAPLE Mon-Sat, 'til 2:00 on Sundays DOUBLE FEATURE 1IICoast to Coast (PG) BENJAMIN 3:30 7:15 1:15 3:15 5:15 Caddysha (R) 7:30 9:45 1:45 5:15 9:00 DOUBLE FEATURE Why Would Honeysuckle Rose (PG) li (PG) 1:45 7:00 Willie & Phil (R) 1:30 5:30 4:00 9:15 3:3097:30 Bette Midler and her Harlettes (Jocelyn Brown, Ulas Hedwig, Diva Gray), tastefully attired as usual, run through a somewhat glitzed-up version of nothing less than Bruce Springsteen's "The E Street Shuffle" in 'Divine Mad- ness,' Michael Ritchie's current filmed record of Bette's campy stage show. The movie has its share of giddy vulgarity and fun, but it's basically the same act Midler's been touring with for nearly a decade, and the wear and tear are beginning to show. Midler's willingness to deflate her imposing starriness and assurance keeps her out of real trouble during all of the comedy-even when she resorts to playing with her underarm flab-but she comes much, dangerously closer at times when her dramatic control goes awry. The Roses' finale was stunning because of the story's basic cumulative power and the unerring performing precision that lurked beneath the character's drained desperation. The suicidal one-last-effort-before dying song, "Stay With Me," is shamelessly reprised here-in poor, artifically clogged voice, with a half-ton of end-of- the-world gestures and grimaces. This, emotional crescendo which had been carefully built up to in The Rose is hauled out by itself one-third of the way through Divine Madness, and as a result its theatrical pathos is mechanical and vaguely distasteful. MIDLER IS ON the thinnest ice when waxing sentimental; it brings out her stage, saved from gaudy disaster only by having the talent and uniqueness to (generally) hold together the sometimes ill-matched pieces of her heartfelt/joke/gay/MOR/dish image. If she had been born ten years earlier, her naturally funny quirks probably would have been channelled into being something as harmlessly "zany" as another Carol Burnett. A terribly cute, overextended pantomime skit here is a direct rewrite of Burnett's maudline charwoman routine, and it represents Bette's worst Broadway-banal tenden- cies. For all of its faults, Divine Madness still has a fair share of inspired momen- ts. When she gets some halfway decent lines (in strangely short supply here) Midler is hilarious in that cracked-ice, down-to-earth way that Joan Blondell was. There's a priceless low-rent rap about Queen Elizabeth: ". . . She's the whitest woman in the world. She makes us all look like the Third World." That Couple recalls Kennedy speech (Continued from Page 5) bilingual education and racial desegration programs. WHILE THE momentum for organizing the Peace Corps began at the University, "it could have happened in a lot of places," Judy Guskin said. "(The University) has always been relatively unique on student activism," Alan Guskin added. "It has always been in the forefront and has had a moderating influence" on campus ac- tivism across the country. "There has never been violence (here) in a significant way," he said. He said one reason for this is that "faculty and students have always kept connected with each other, radical students can communicate with liberal * faculty members." JUDY GUSKIN said the input of foreign students and faculty members at the University with experience in agriculture, medicine, and education was an important factor in the Peace Corps' formation. Alan Guskin added the thrust for the establishment of the Peace Corps was more likely to come from the Midwest where "there was a certain air of openness, idealism, naivete, and not so much cynicism." Although the Guskins had been on the periphery of the civil rights movement, the ann arbor fim cooperative TONIGHT presents TONIGHT TRUFFAUT DOUBLE FEATURE they said, they had never been active in political movements. But they left the University in 1961 to work with the newly-established Peace Corps in Thailand. ALAN GUSKIN, among other things, assisted in the establishment of a program in educational psychology and research at Chulalongkorn University. Judy Guskin primarily helped to train English teachers at the university. The Guskins lamented the drop in the number of Peace Corps volunteers during the last decade, from a high point of 14,968 in 1967 to only 5,615 this year. Judy Guskin said while students still have humanitarian concerns today, it is difficult to mobilize these interests in a meaningful way. This, they said, is par- tially due to a lack of national leader- ship which evokes student enthusiasm and trust. ALTHOUGH THE Peace Corps has, changed to provide Third World nations with more technical assistance, the goals of the program and the benefits received by participants remain the same, Alan Guskin said. "The most important aspects of the Peace Corps," he said, "are the person- to-person relationships formed, and the knowledge, empathy, and insight which volunteers take back home with them" and leave behind. The Peace Corps has had a lasting impact on the Guskins' li.ves. "We had an ideal," Alan Guskin said, "and in ac- ting upon it successfully, we always continue to search out how we can make an impact, a difference. Once you've done that, you can't go back to being apethetic." _. Get into shape. $14."hp. 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